BOOKS THE GENDER. GAME A new book claims that culture, not nature, has kept women from athletic equality. BY REBECCA MEAD T he United States women's soccer team that romped to victory in last summer's distaff World Cup didn't have a real opponent. There was, granted, the team of Chinese women whom the Americans beat in a penalty shoot-out in the tournament's final game. But they didn't have to compete against the ulti- mate challenger: a preëxisting notion, in the American imagination, of soccer as it is played by a team of accomplished men. Owing to this accident of sports history, the Women's World Cup opened up a vista onto how the world would look if women enjoyed what Colette Dowling, in her new book, "The Frailty Myth" (Random House; $24.95), calls "physical equality" The remaining bat- tle to be fought by the women's move- ment, Dowling contends, is the fight for women's movement-for the freedom to enjoy the strength and power of their bodies, whether haring around the play- ing field or striding down the sidewalk. Dowling's earlier books include "The Cinderella Complex," a best-selling psy- chosocial polemic in which she argued that women have an unconscious ten- dency to make themselves emotionally dependent upon men, and "Maxing Out," in which she argued that women have an unconscious tendency to under- mine any financial success they might achieve. (It was based on her own ex- perience of getting wildly into debt af- ter making a bundle on "The Cinder- ella Complex.") In "The Frailty Myth," women and the unconscious are at it again, this time participating in a culture- wide prohibition on women's being as active as men, or occupying as much space, or having their athletic achieve- ments taken as seriously. "For centuries women have been shackled to a percep- tion of themselves as weak and ineffec- tual," Dowling writes. "This perception has been nothing less than the emotional and cognitive equivalent of having our whole bodies bound." 164 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21 & 28, 2000 Dowling compares the idea that men will necessarily be better athletes than women because they are taller and more muscular with the myth that men are the more intelligent sex because they have bigger brains. The apparent disparity in athletic achievement between boys and girls, she argues, has nothing to do with innate ability and everything to do with training and expectations. She offers some provocative data to support this position, including a study that showed a group of second-grade boys outthrowing their female peers while using their dominant arm (with which, being boys, they had had plenty of practice) but doing no better than the girls when both sexes were using their nondominant arm. "Throwing like a girl" really means throwing like a novice, something that could be corrected if girls, as Dowling puts it, "got out of the doll corner" and practiced like boys. The idea of girls being able to kick their brothers' asses on the softball field is an appealing one; but Dowling does not address the more dif- ficult question of whether one would re- ally want a nation of daughters who have spent interminable hours throwing a ball against a wall, rather than engaging in the kind of play through which they de- velop empathy and imagination. Dowling acknowledges that men have, thus far, outperformed women in strength and endurance; but, she says, the "strength gap" is closing, as a result of Title IX, the 1972 ruling that required schools to provide equal funding for women's sports, and of role models, from Billie Jean King to Mia Hamm. In re- cent decades, women have been setting new world records at a far sWIfter pace than men have, and that's unsurprising If you compare the athleticism of to- day's top sporting women with that of their punier predecessors. But Dowling pushes the argument too far when she suggests that, following a biomechanical method used to compare the perfor- mance of male weight lifters of differ- ent heights, women's performance rela- tive to men's should be adjusted for their smaller size. By this calculation, Flor- ence Griffith Joyner, the world's fastest woman, was faster than Carl Lewis, the world's fastest man. This is a neat political point, but a spurious one in the compet- itive arena. The average Chinese woman is shorter than the average American woman: if the Women's World Cup final had been biomechanically adjusted, the Chinese team might have walked away with the trophy. Dowling takes a brief tour through the rustory of women's sports, and it's a dispiriting vie Although women in the Middle Ages may have been allowed to develop their horseback-riding skills, they were not allowed to participate in élite competitions, except as prizes for the male competitors, which is not the same thing at all. The Victorians, as usual, were spoilsports, arguing that women would ruin their reproductive potential or otherwise compromise their femininity if they engaged in vigorous exercise. (The fad for bicycling in the late eighteen-hundreds was discouraged by commentators who disapproved of women developing the set, aggressive look of "bicycle face.") Throughout the twentieth century, women's growing presence in sports has been accompa- nied by an unsubde insinuation that athletic achievement and femininity are mutually exclusive: it seems that most accomplished female athletes have been suspected of being lesbians. The fact that some accomplished female athletes were indeed lesbians does not diminish the in- vasiveness of the attention paid to, sa)', Mildred (Babe) Didrickson, an Olympic gold-medal winner whose eventual mar- riage generated headlines of relief Dowl- ing notes that the mass-media fantasies of the sex lives of female athletes have changed in recent years, with the sports babe being the new paradigm. (One imagines that lesbianism in, say, Anna Kournikova, wowd be more of a titillation than a threat to the readers of the maga- zines that have featured her on their cov- ers, particwarly if she were getting it on with, oh, Martina Hingis.) Dowling seems to feel dutybound to deny that girls might be less competitive than boys, even when her evidence is not entirely convincing. Jere Longman,